Learning

Chapter Three: Women and their daily life

2. Learning

Girls begin to weave and to grind corn because they see what their mothers do and how they do it. They see how their mothers weave and prepare the corn. The little girls do this as a form of play.

The little girl is happy when she begins to weave. She begins to weave once she has her weaving set up, but she asks for help too because if her weaving unravels, it makes her sad and angry. To learn, she weaves sashes, ribbons for her dolls or for her hair, and bracelets for her mother or sisters.

In our grandmothers’ day, they used to prepare the cotton using a material made from leather with a pair of sticks in each hand. To make the yarn, they would thoroughly beat the cotton, and then once it was completely loosened, they would spin the thread and roll it into a ball. They used to do this work as a group and then they would take the yarn to the capital for dyeing various colors. When the warp of the weaving was set up on the warping frame, they take it off and wet it in corn mash thinned with water that they have ground and strained.